Facebook Updates Its Messaging Service

Rumors have been circulating over the world wide web that Facebook is working on its message inboxes into an e-mail service.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg , Facebook founder, formally unveiled the subject of the rumors codenamed “Titan” and officially named simply “Facebook Messages” at an event in San Francisco,
Although Zuckerberg has been stressing that whatever this new thing is, it’s not e-mail. Instead, Facebook is having a massive update to its current messaging system, chat feature, text-messaging integration, and smartphone applications that mashes up all sorts of communications which also includes e-mail into one unified stream.

Zuckerberg and Facebook engineer Andrew Bosworth mostly talked about the service rather than demoing it, but they said that it’ll include features such as these:

* Every Facebook user will get an e-mail address: If your Facebook profile is located at facebook.com/yournamehere, your e-mail address will be yournamehere@facebook.com.

* If you’re logged into Facebook, incoming e-mail will show up in the service’s chat service; reply to a message, and it’ll be sent as an e-mail.

* Facebook iPhone app will notify you of e-mail and let you receive and send messages. (An Android version will come along later.)

* You can organize the people you receive messages from into important people like family and friends, others who aren’t so improtant such as credit card companies, and Junk.

* You can also choose to have messages from people not on your Facebook friends list bounced, period.

* Facebook messages will be able to include file attachments; a deal with Microsoft will let you edit documents using the Office Web Apps online suite.

* The service will go beyond threaded-message interfaces such as Gmail’s Conversations by letting you scroll back through all the communications you’ve had with a particular person via Facebook, all in one place.

Having more than 500 million Facebook subscribers and growing, Zuckerberg and Bosworth explained that all this is in part a reaction to the needs of folks younger than themselves.

Facebook delivers four billion private messages a day. The company isn’t going to spring all these new features on everybody all at once: Instead, it’ll roll them out gradually over the next few months. Only a few people will get them starting today.